THE FUTURE IS A MOVING TARGET: Epcot turns 30 PART 5: Reaching out to corporate America

The Walt Disney CompanyJohn Hench, left, and Marty Sklar led a team of Disney Imagineers on a journey to discover just what Epcot should be.

“Some aspects, some version [of Walt’s Epcot concept] would have happened and it would have changed a lot, because the evolution of these projects is so dynamic,” Marty Sklar said. “I have this ad I kept in my office all the time. It was from IBM. It said ‘The Future is a Moving Target.’ And nobody saw that as clearly as Walt Disney did, believe me.”

So Sklar, as well as fellow Disney executives John Hench, Carl Borgirno, Don Edgren and Randy Bright, embarked on a veritable crusade to discover exactly what Epcot’s mission should be ... and how that vision would be paid for.

What Epcot wouldn’t be was another traditional theme park. “If you think about it, at that time, and even today, it had to have that contrast,” Sklar said. “Why should we go into competition with ourselves? So the contrast was good.

“The big thing was that we decided we had to test the water, so we held what we called The Epcot Future Technology Forums, starting in 1976,” Sklar said. “Ray Bradbury [the noted science fiction writer who contributed to Epcot's communication theme] was the first speaker. And we invited people from academia, from government, from corporations and just smart people that we found through our research and it was really fascinating because we had these long discussions.

“We’d show Walt’s film and we had translated that into potential directions. It was very early on. And after every one of these conferences, these people would say to us, ‘The public doesn’t trust government to do this, the public doesn’t trust what industry tells them, but they trust Mickey Mouse. So you guys have a role in this.’

“Well that was very nice to hear people say that, but what the heck do you do about that? I went back to Card Walker, who was a marketing man from his experiences with the studio, and we decided to go back to the whole idea that Walt had said, that no one company can do this by itself.

The Walt Disney CompanyGeneral Motors was the first big company to sponsor a pavilion at Epcot, the World of Motion.

“And that’s when we started going out to all the big corporations and said, ‘OK, here’s what we’re planning to do and we want you to be part it.’”

Getting American industry to fall in line “was a huge selling job,” Sklar remembers. “There were a couple of key moments in it. For one, we found a man who came to one of our conferences. His name was Tibor Nagy. And he was one of the chief scientists at General Motors and he’d come to this conference intrigued. ‘What the heck is a Mickey Mouse organization doing in this other field? he said.’

“And he got intrigued with the project and he was on a committee at General Motors called The Scenario 2000 Advisory Committee. Now remember this was 1978 and the chairman was Roger Smith. Ty called me a said, ‘I’m gonna go to Roger and suggest that you get invited back here to make a presentation about this project.

“We packed up two truckloads of models and artwork and we hired John McClure Sr. John had been the art director for the Hall of Presidents, but more importantly, he was one of the great art directors in Hollywood. He did “Hello, Dolly” and he did “Cleopatra,” among things, so John set up our presentation.

“They gave us the whole design center in Warren, Michigan. They had an area where they introduced their cars. It was big ... huge. They gave us the whole thing. We set up these models and Card Walker put together all the people that were key to the project — Donn Tatum, Dick Nunis, Jack Lindquist and the new Disney Channel people, who were just getting started. Everybody that was gonna be part of making this thing work” was there.

The Walt Disney CompanyThe Land pavilion in Future World is sponsored by Kraft.

“We made a big presentation to Roger Smith and his Scenario 2000 Advisory Committee, and when we were finished, Roger said ‘I want to do this. There’s only one problem: I’ve got to convince my management.’ He was the vice president of finance at the time, later chairman.

“Jack Lindquist and I were left behind and the next day at 7 o’clock in the morning, we made a presentation to Pete Estes, the president of GM, and they became the first ones to sign a contract at the end of 1978.”

From that point on, companies seemed eager to be part of this exciting Epcot project.

“That broke the dam, if you will, and Exxon was right behind them,” Sklar said. “We made so many presentations that we figured out that we couldn’t get the top people to go to Florida or California, so we went to RCA and said, ‘Do you have a place that we could set up as a presentation center,’ and they did.

“They had a recording studio at Avenue of the Americas and 46th Street where Andre Costellanez used to do his recordings and they said we could have it for a year. And so we rented it and we brought all our models and artwork and we put a staff there and any time of the day or week, if we wanted to set up a meeting, with companies headquartered in the New York area, as most of them were in those days, they could call up and say, ‘Yeah, I’d like to have my chairman come in and see your project.’ “I went back over my records,” Sklar added. “One year, I think it was 1979, I was gone 26 weeks. Most of those were back and forth to New York for presentations.”

The game-plan was to create two separate sections of one park, one focused on American industry and new technologies, the other on showcasing as many countries as possible in a permanent setting.

“That’s how we communicated to the companies,” Sklar said. “We started out with trying to do two projects. One was international and the other was so-called Future World area, and we found that we couldn’t get enough sponsorship for both, so we pushed the two of them together basically and that became Epcot Center.

“These projects are so expensive,” he added. “Without the sponsors, particularly in those days, you couldn’t do those kind of things. Disney didn’t have the wherewithal to finance something like that by itself.”

So Sklar and Co. pressed on, doing their best to entice the movers and shakers in the business world to buy into Epcot. Even though many of them didn’t quite understand what an Epcot was, they were intrigued nonetheless.

“I remember one time Bill Beers, who was the chairman of Kraft, and I were in a meeting at Imagineering and Mr. Beers stepped out to take a phone call and I went out with him and, when he was coming back, he said, ‘You know Marty, in that conference room, there are the nine key people in my organization. They never get together to talk. I am forcing them to work together to make this project work and that’s because I want to be involved in this project.’

The Walt Disney CompanyA concept drawing of the PeopleMover transportation system for Epcot.

“There were a lot of visionaries in the companies that we dealt with who rolled the dice with us.”

Journalists who were privy to Walt’s original ideas and concepts and who had, in fact, seen detailed drawings of a domed city with futuristic modes of transportation, had a hard time accepting this new Epcot.

“Walt left a very sketchy outline,” said Lindquist. “It was developed at that time (1966) to influence the Florida legislature. We needed something bigger, bolder, more dramatic than another Disneyland.”

Walt asked fabled Disney artist Herb Ryman — who had made a name for himself in 1954 by drawing the first rendering of Disneyland which Walt used to show potential investors — to help conceptualize Epcot. “Draw me something to talk about, Herbie,” he said.

But what Ryman came up with was bigger and bolder than almost anyone had imagined. It turned out to be more fantasy than fact-based.

"I'd say we are doing exactly what we talked about when Walt was alive," John Hench said when asked if the company was departing from Disney's original plan. "Walt introduced ideas as, you might say, the title in Scene One. He knew better than to drop the big scene into people's minds at the beginning. We're engaged in Scene Two now."

What this new Epcot wouldn’t be was a venue similar to Disneyland or the Magic Kingdom in Florida. It had to be bold and different, a clear departure from anything anyone had ever created before.